By Ed Hammer

When I first saw that former Gov. George Ryan had written a book about his efforts to put a halt to the death penalty In Illinois, I became concerned. What bothered me was that Ryan might attempt to use the book to reverse the stigma he earned from a 35-year political career replete with corruption.
On April 17, 2006, a jury found Ryan guilty on 22 counts of corruption (later reduced by a judge to 20) linked to his time as Illinois Secretary of State. I became aware of his corruption as early as 1993 while being assigned as a special agent/investigator for the Secretary of State’s Office. My partner Russell Sonneveld and I investigated several cases Involving multiple subjects obtaining commercial driver’s licenses in exchange for bribes – and that bribe money ending up in the Citizens for Ryan campaign fund.
Those cases were being prematurely closed without prosecutorial review by SOS inspector general Dean Bauer, our supervisor and Ryan’s close friend. Then, on Election Day in 1994, six children were killed in a fiery crash on I-94 south of Milwaukee by a truck driver who obtained one of those licenses for bribes. When Bauer also closed our investigation on that tragic case, we knew the obstruction had to be stopped. We arranged to meet with an investigator with United States Department of Justice. Nine years later, on December 17, 2003, after completing two terms as Secretary of State and one term as governor, Ryan was indicted. The charges included obstruction of justice.

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Posted on January 19, 2021

By Lisa Feldman Barrett/Undark

This excerpt is adapted from 7 1/2 Lessons About The Brain.
Most of your life takes place in a made-up world. You live in a country whose name and whose borders were made up by people. You allow particular humans to be leaders of that country, such as a president or a member of Congress, by following procedures invented by people long dead, such as elections, and you give them powers that were also made up by people. You acquire food and other goods with something called “money,” which is represented by pieces of paper and metal and even by electromagnetic waves flowing through the air, and which is also completely made up. You actively and willingly participate in this made-up world every day. It is real to you. It’s as real as your own name, which, by the way, was also made up by people.
We all live in a world of social reality that exists only inside our collective human brains. Nothing in physics or chemistry determines that you’re leaving the United States and entering Canada, or that an expanse of water has certain fishing rights, or that a specific arc of the Earth’s orbit around the sun is called January. These things are real to us anyway. Socially real.

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Posted on January 5, 2021